Natural Convection
 

Hello all,

I am currently working on a transient heat transfer problem with natural convection. My operating pressure is atmospheric (and won't change much) but I will have high temperature differences. I have deduced that I should use the "Incompressible-Ideal-Gas" setting to have density varying as a function of temperature only.

My question is this: If I want my initial density to be that at a certain temperature (300K for example) before the transient nature of the system starts, should I run a steady state heat transfer simulation at that temperature (so Fluent can calculate the density) then run my transient calculations or will specifying an operating density do the same thing?

It seems to me that specifying an operating density would restrict the whole system to that density. Am I wrong?

Thanks for the consideration.